In Kosovo, by contrast, almost all women, even in small villages, dress like women in the rest of Europe. Streets, cafés, restaurants, and bars are not all-male affairs as they are in much of the Islamic world, where women spend almost all their lives behind walls. If it weren’t for the occasional mosque minaret on the skyline, there is little visible evidence that Kosovo is a Muslim-majority country at all. Kosovo looks, feels, and is European.
A small number of well-heeled Islamic extremists from the Gulf states have moved into Kosovo to rebuild damaged mosques and transform liberal Balkan Islam into the more severe version found in the deserts of Saudi Arabia. They’ve had a small amount of success with a similar project in nearby Bosnia, but they’re meeting stiffer resistance from Kosovo’s religious community as well as from secular citizens.
“We are working very hard to stop these kinds of movements,” said Professor Xhabir Hamiti, of the Islamic studies department at the University of Pristina. “These kinds of movements are dangerous for all nations, for all faiths, for all religions. We are Muslims, but we think the European way. I am a Muslim, I am a scholar, I know how to deal with Islam in my country. There is no need for Arabs to come here. I have no need for their suggestions, no need for their explanations. We created our Islam ourselves here, and we can continue our Islam with our own minds.”
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Kosovo is deep rooted clan society, arranged and forced marriages is common along with gruesome blood feuds. If one could make some parallel it would be mafia structures in Sicily but I doubt that it is a common interpretation of what’s feels and is European.
It was a short-lived guerrilla movement that rose up against Slobodan Milosevic’s régime, first to fight for independence from an apartheid-like system, and later as a defence against mass murder and ethnic-cleansing.
Well KLA did appear on the scene when Tito parted from the Yugoslavian project, that is long before Milosevic. The albanization of Kosovo have been a project long before KLA was created the 1974 autonomy didn’t come from thin air. The militarization of the project have probably much more to do with Tito’s death than Milosevic.
In Yugoslavia Kosovo had record population growth rate, Serb and other ethnic groups share on steady decline over the decades. Serbs did almost keep up in absolute numbers, that they did not have “normal” growth was due to lower birthrates and exodus of Serbs from Kosovo.
One resemblance with Islamic countries is the steady decline of minority ethnicities and religions, there for some reason some parts of the world where multiculturalism don’t thrive.
Kosovo face enormous problems, to just keep up they need a steady economic growth rate about 5%, to improve it should be around 7%. This is not any new Monaco, Hong Kong, Singapore and so on. Poor education, poor infrastructure, insufficient rule of law, pre-industrial social structures is just some of the problems. If the steady population growth continue Kosovo will have doubled its population in 30-40 years (and there is already a water problem with its present population) and then is already a significant part of its Kosovars in working age living abroad. And then one hasn’t even touched the European problem of Kosovo as an drug, trafficking and criminal hub in Europe.
The socialist modernization didn’t succeed in will the neo-liberal do it.
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